A cinematic sequence depicts the 1970s as the decade of moral bankruptcy for Hollywood. A 12-year-old girl is carried through a posh brothel in a heavily-made-up state as drooling customers compete for her virginity. Brooke Shields, then just 11 years old, had to perform a naked television appearance and kiss 29-year-old Keith Carradine in order to portray the child prostitute in Beautiful Baby. The movie’s production company wanted to cast Jodie Foster, 14, in the role, but French director Louis Malle insisted on Shields.
Shields later defended the 1978 movie about the New Orleans red-light district, but it sparked outrage and was perceived as nothing more than child pornography.
In the UK, it was given an X-rating, and its release was postponed while cuts were made. It wasn’t available for viewing in Canada until 1995. However, for young Brooke, this was the beginning of a cycle of exploitation that resulted in her being raped by a business insider in her early 20s, as she now claims in an explosive new documentary.
Why, after decades of keeping it a secret, does Brooke Shields, star of the movie Beautiful Baby, finally reveal the most gruesome ‘Me Too’ Hollywood tale of all?
She was the youngest model to ever grace the Vogue cover at the age of 14, when other girls were still adorning their pencil cases. The same year, she started filming the lewd teen romance Blue Lagoon, in which her character repeatedly got naked and had sex with her fellow shipwrecked love interest (played by Christopher Atkins, who was 18 at the time). Shields claims that despite the fact that a body double was used for her sex scenes, the directors encouraged her to carry on an off-screen relationship with Atkins.
She had more sex and nudity in Franco Zeffirelli’s romantic comedy Endless Love the year after it was released, which was about two high school sweethearts who are forbidden from seeing one another. While writhing around in figure-hugging denim with the seductive tagline: “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvin’s? Nothing,” she also made an appearance in racy Calvin Klein Jeans advertisements at the age of 15. ”. Due to the movie and marketing campaign, she rose to international fame.
As the party girl mascot of Studio 54 in New York, she gained international fame as “Brooke.”. She was the adolescent who, according to a prestigious agency, was “so gorgeous that strong men forgot to flick their cigar ash.” She had long, shiny hair that made her look older than her years and distinctive thick brows that gave her a distinct look. ”.
Why, after decades of keeping it a secret, does Brooke Shields, star of the movie Beautiful Baby, finally reveal the most gruesome ‘Me Too’ Hollywood tale of all?
Shields later admitted that she would have preferred to wait even longer to have sex despite having a vampire-like appearance and that she didn’t have any until she was 22. She was incorrectly referred to as “America’s most famous virgin” as a result of this discovery. ”. She had avoided the worst excesses of Hollywood’s predators, though, thanks in part to her abstinence.
She spent years holding her manager Teri, her vehemently defensive mother, accountable. If someone gave me a strange look, she’d threaten, “I’ll cut off your b***s and make you eat them.”. In 2019, Shields uttered this. She stated in an interview that she was “sort of untouchable… I was not easy prey” and had never had a “MeToo moment,” but less than a year later, she is now singing a very different tune.
Why, after decades of keeping it a secret, does Brooke Shields, star of the movie Beautiful Baby, finally reveal the most gruesome ‘Me Too’ Hollywood tale of all?
In the documentary Beautiful Baby, which had its American premiere last month, the 57-year-old actress makes the accusation that a male employee of the entertainment business sexually assaulted her in a hotel room when she was just 20 years old.
She met with him to discuss potential movie projects after graduating from Princeton University in 1987. Following dinner, the man, whom she claims to be a friend, offered to call her a taxi and then departed from his hotel room. Shields claims that her “friend” came back naked and attacked her, giving a nod to the rapist producer Harvey Weinstein. He stood directly over me. “It felt exactly like wrestling,” she continues. ”.
God knows I knew how to be disassociated from my body, but Shields claims she “froze” and refrained from retaliating out of fear of death. ”. I’d mastered that ability already. She says she left the hotel after the incident, got in a cab, and drove “all the way” to another friend’s house while sobbing. Shields claims that she fought what had happened to her for years while sipping wine at dinner. I entered the room. She explains how her quick ascent to fame at such a young age came about: “I was just so trusting. “Sometimes, I’m surprised I made it through at all. ”.
Why is Beautiful Baby star Brooke Shields, 57, finally delivering the most horrific ‘Me Too’ Hollywood story of all after keeping it secret for decades?
A childhood friend who appears in the film, Laura Linney, remembers thinking, “I hope she’s okay.”. She was a little girl, living in an adult-dominated world. In addition, how Hollywood used that youth. When she had to kiss actor Keith Carradine in the movie Beautiful Baby, Shields acknowledges that she had never kissed anyone before. I assured her that it would not be taken into account. Every move is a deception. Carradine said, “It’s all made up,” to her. Shields asserts that in response, she made an effort to tell the real her from the sleazy on-screen version of herself. I developed the ability to compartmentalize at a young age. It gave people a way to survive‘.
However, some believe that this was the catalyst for the actress’s serious identity crisis, which also affected her sexual orientation. After all, the depravity of Beautiful Baby and the gentle porn in Blue Lagoon were poles apart from what she experienced at home. Teri Schmon, an ambitious actress from New Jersey’s working-class community, and Frank Schmon, a successful businessman, were her parents. She was raised in a devoutly Catholic home.
Teri’s family gave her money for an abortion after she announced she was pregnant at age 31 following a brief romance with Frank, but she instead used it to buy a coffee table. When Shields was only five months old, his parents got married before divorcing. Teri never remarried, but Frank did, and they had three more daughters after getting hitched to a socialite. As a result, Brooke was a dual citizen of two worlds. She occasionally traveled to Long Island to see her affluent father and step-sisters (he paid for her to attend several private schools in New York), but she spent most of her time in a modest Manhattan apartment with her mother.
Why, after decades of keeping it a secret, does Brooke Shields, star of the movie Beautiful Baby, finally reveal the most gruesome ‘Me Too’ Hollywood tale of all?
Teri, a bitter alcoholic, was determined to live vicariously through her beautiful daughter and pushed her into fame at a young age. When she was only 11 months old, Shields took part in her very first photo shoot for an Ivory soap advertisement. As the extraordinary talent of her daughter started to pay off, Teri put all of her money into real estate. She had a significant impact on her daughter’s life, interrogating and intimidating potential suitors and even accompanying Brooke to filming locations where Brooke once taped her mouth shut due to her habit of swearing like a construction worker.
Shields recently made an effort to dispel the notion that Teri was the “stage mother from hell,” allowing her ten-year-old son to appear in promotional pictures entirely naked. Shields claimed that she had a good relationship with her mother, who died in 2021.
Shields’ mother’s bad behavior may explain why she always made sure her behavior was impeccable, despite tales of various pranks with Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, and the Rolling Stones in Studio 54. She goes on to say that she always got home by ten o’clock and that drinking and using drugs were forbidden. m. Although Young Brooke had a few male friends. John Travolta, who is ten years her senior, would pick her up from high school when she was 17 years old.
Before he became famous, George Michael was already a pop star and, she surmised, a fan. Years later, she reflected, “I just felt like he was being exceptionally respectful of my virginity. ”. She asserts that she experienced her first true love when she first started college. In her first year at Princeton, where she studied French literature, she wrote a book extolling the virtues of chastity, vowing to remain “pure” until the night of her wedding and urging other young Americans to do the same.
It might not come as a shock that she later lost her virginity to Dean Cain, a fellow Princeton student who would go on to play Superman in the television series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, when she was 22 years old. Later, more than 30 years later, with a lackluster film career driving a shift to Broadway, she confessed her love for Andre Agassi, the slightly more alluring successor to John McEnroe as tennis’ bad boy. A few months later, he stopped his tour and flew to New York to be with her while she was receiving serious bunion treatment in the hospital.
In 1997, the actress was heard yelling, “Drop him! “I’m getting married to him!” during an argument Shields’ sober mother had with the latter over the infamous tennis “punk.”. Despite this, the marriage only lasted two years. Their long-term separations while she pursued her career and he competed in tournaments were found to be the most likely cause of their marriage’s demise. In a 1995 Friends episode, Agassi made a sexy cameo in which she licked Matt LeBlanc’s fingers. Agassi became very protective of him as a result, storming off the court, smashing his Wimbledon trophy on the way home.
Why, after decades of keeping it a secret, does Brooke Shields, star of the movie Beautiful Baby, finally reveal the most gruesome ‘Me Too’ Hollywood tale of all?
However, there were rumors that the two were not compatible sexually and that Shields disliked being around men. She stated, “There are many women I find quite attractive,” in an interview with the homosexual publication The Advocate in 2000. But in this day and age, that is unacceptable. But the following year, after meeting through a mutual friend, she wed television writer Chris Henchy. Following several IVF cycles, they gave birth to two daughters, Rowan and Grier.
Shields continued by mentioning her postpartum depression and 2005 suicidal thoughts. She said, “I finally had a healthy, gorgeous baby girl, and I couldn’t look at her. ”. After a few weeks, Shields’ Endless Love co-star Tom Cruise, a Scientologist who thinks that psychiatry is cruel, criticized Shields for taking the antidepressant Paxil and snidely questioned where her career had gone. Shields shot back, telling Cruise to “stick to battling aliens”—a reference to the Scientologists’ belief that we all have parasitic space aliens inside us that must be exterminated.
Many readers will recall her strange connection to another ludicrous superstar. Shields first met Michael Jackson when she was 13 years old, according to her eulogy at his funeral in 2009. In the same speech, she also mentioned that she had attended one of Elizabeth Taylor’s weddings as his “date.”. In 1993, Jackson told Oprah Winfrey that Shields was his girlfriend for the first time. In 2001, he said the same thing to a different interviewer, adding, “We dated a lot. ”. Her pictures covered my entire room, including my mirror and wall. ‘.
Shields claimed he had repeatedly asked her to adopt a child with him and to get married, but she insisted they were just friends. She calls her relationship with Jackson “childlike” in the new documentary. ”. That would be fitting for a famous person who recently admitted that she didn’t think of sex as “my experience” until she was in her 40s. She said she had been “terrified” of it before that. Who could blame her given what she has recently revealed about her past?
